Twitter, Travel Apps and the Fate of the Guidebook

In The Guardian, Benji Lanyado outlines his transition over the last few years from traditional guidebook user to travel blog junkie and, finally, to Twitter-traveler. Here’s his take on the next phase—the rise of travel apps like Foursquare:

What once required hours of rifling through guidebooks, or Googling into the provincial nooks of the internet, is now attainable in an instant. And increasingly we don’t need to find the information. It can find us.

Having convinced the online public to reveal who they are (through social networking sites such as Facebook) and what they are doing (via Twitter), the web’s latest question is significantly more zoomed in: where are you? Location-specific information is what we want, especially when we are travelling.

Lanyado notes that roaming fees remain a serious obstacle to widespread app use. There’s also a (mostly) thoughtful and civilized follow-up discussion in the comments.

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